Intern Spotlight: Meet Olivia

by Olivia Billbrough, Spring 2014 Intern

I cannot spell. Or, at least, I am very bad at spelling. While this is probably not the best confession to make as a budding publishing professional, I feel that it is an important part of me—that even though I have difficulty spelling, I can still write. Like how Beethoven was deaf and became one of the world’s most renowned musicians (not that I’m really comparing myself to Beethoven).

I might be exaggerating a little bit, but when I was younger, I was so bad at spelling that my third grade teacher actually made fun of me in front of the whole class during a spelling bee competition. The word was dangerous. As in, “I was dangerously close to tears, thank-you-very-much.”

So when I returned home from my sophomore year at Emerson College after being published in two literary magazines on campus, I was feeling pretty accomplished. I saw my third grade teacher at my old school, and she said that she was surprised that I could do it. And maybe that was the push I needed to continue writing and to prove, especially to myself, that it is something I can do.

Before coming to Publishing Solutions Group, I had taken several publishing and writing courses at Emerson College and was also part of Emerson’s Undergraduate Students for Publishing, in which I created a Tumblr page as part of the marketing campaign for one of the books being published.

Thanks to my experience in the Emerson College BFA writing program over the last four years, my writing ability has greatly improved, and after interning with PSG over the past couple of months, I have been able to practice this craft every day by writing a weekly blog post. While I may never be the kind of artist who creates such beautiful images as John Smith crashing The Last Supper, thanks to PSG, I know that despite my third-grade teacher’s doubts, writing is the kind of art I could do every day and still love. I certainly felt that way when contributing to the PSG blog campaign, especially when the blogs have to do with interesting topics such as education and literature.

Little-Known Facts About Olivia

Apart from hiding my bad spelling, my other hidden talents include being ambidextrous (not a fun word to spell, hello spell check), being a super-recognizer and starting a Doctor Who club at Emerson . . . that quickly devolved into watching tons of sci-fi shows and eating donuts surrounded by a group of young women swooning over David Tennant’s hair.